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Software protection and registration.

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John2k:
Hi,

I'm currently in the process of releasing a shareware product and I'm having trouble deciding on which way to go as regards to using activation keys.
From a developer's point of view, software should be protected as much as possible from piracy etc, but at what cost to the customer? Having the application 'phone home' and be limited to one machine would not be acceptable for me as a customer, so I would like to ask what other method I could possibly use.

I have toyed with the idea of eliminating any kind of activation and trusting the customer to the EULA, and maybe offer a good support package to warrant paying for it.

Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks.

tinjaw:
John2k,

I would highly suggest you take a look at some of the discussion going on right now. Brad Wardell, of Stardock, has taken the stand that piracy doesn't hurt sales, bad business practices do. With one bad business practice being making it difficult for a purchaser to use what they bought hassle free. In short, he is for registration, but no other form of copy protection.

If you want to go down this latest rendition of the rabbit hole, you can start here and make sure to follow the link to Brad's article. You can then follow the discussions on many of the popular game review/commentary/discussion blogs and forums.

Brad is providing me the support for what I personally want to do, which is activation, a central company owned server, and no DRM.

mouser:
It's definitely a tricky question filled with choices.

I think you are at least thinking about it properly --- if you make it too annoying you are going to alienate your customers.

In some sense I guess I am in the camp of people that think that piracy probably does very little harm, BUT with one very serious caveat.  My experience is that if you don't give people some non-negligible incentive to buy your program they probably won't.  That might be as simple as saying that the program must be purchased and providing a simple registration system, and not worrying about pirates and crackers, etc.

In general though, it seems to me the easiest course to take is often to buy an existing protection system like Asprotect.  I would just reiterate the idea that I would not worry about getting the "strongest" protection -- I think that's wasted time and likely to cause pain for your users.  Better to find an easy system that is unlikely to malfunction and don't worry about people cracking your protection, they probably aren't potential customers.

Carol Haynes:
I would add if you decide to go down the activation line you need to consider four things:

1) Allow users to activate the product on more than one machine (2 or 3 activations is sufficient for most purposes as that allows people to use the app on the desktop and laptop) - even MS allow this with their Office products (at least in the EULA for Office 2007 - I haven't checked the others).

2) Make it easy for users to deactivate a computer. The one thing I really hate is when I reinstall Windows having to contact a growing list of companies to beg for a new activation because their software is locked to the old activation which has been overwritten. It means reinstalling can take days or weeks, depending at how efficient people are at responding to emails. Adobe manage this painlessly (as do a number of smaller companies) but too many take the attitude 'you have to contact us if you exceed your activations' and that is EXTREMELY frustration - especially as activation becomes more and more prevelant. This is where I get seriously fed up with Microsoft because I might want to legitimately move non-OEM software to a new computer but I don't like having to call them and explain and then share great long strings of numbers!

3) Consider what will happen to your customers if you drop dead or cease trading. From your perspective you won't necessarily care at that point but if your apps become an integral part of someone's life/workflow it will upset them a lot if your activation service suddenly stops functioning.

4) How easy is it to guarantee your activation server will be up 99.99% of the time?

At this point you may consider that activation is going to cost more in time and money than you save by avoiding pirates - most of whom wouldn't have bought the software in the first place, and will find a crack for any activation system you can dream up. The harder the better (more challenge)!

mouser:
I disalike internet-based activations, and i hate licenses tied to a single pc, as carol is describing.  Unless you are selling software that costs thousands of dollars per pc license, i would seriously recommend you avoid such stuff.

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